Death Touch novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Gloves
Mara, 18, leaves the lab on her own feet, and on her first day a cadet rips off her glove; Sergeant Forrest Dalton catches it.
Dr. Fenn held the needle up to the light and smiled at me.
"It will only take a minute, Mara. You'll sleep the whole drive."
I had been sleeping through every trip my whole life.
I was eighteen years old, and I had never seen the outside of Site Nine awake.
I looked at the needle, and then I looked at her.
"No," I said.
Her smile stayed where it was.
"The transport leaves in ten minutes. The school expects a sedated arrival."
"Then the school can be disappointed."
The two guards by the door shifted their weight.
Neither of them stepped toward me.
Nobody at Site Nine ever stepped toward me.
I pulled my grey gloves up past my elbows and buttoned them at the wrist.
They were the only thing between my hands and the world.
I had killed forty-one mice, one lab dog and a technician with those hands.
The technician had only wanted to fix my sleeve.
"I'll walk to the truck," I said. "I'll sit up. I want to see where I'm going."
Fenn's eyes went flat for half a second.
Then the warmth came back.
"Of course, dear."
She set the needle in its tray.
I walked past the guards and up the long concrete ramp.
It was the first time I had climbed it without a bag over my head.
Daylight hit my face at the top, white and enormous.
I stopped and stared.
Nevada was just dirt and sky, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
The drive took twenty hours.
I watched every mile.
Halloran Military Academy sat behind a gate on an Army post in Montana.
It had a flag, four brick buildings and a parade field the size of a lake.
It was a high school.
Cadets in grey uniforms stood in rows on the field, hundreds of them, backs straight.
The truck let me out at the gate and drove away.
Nobody had told me how to be looked at by four hundred people.
A tall boy with a battalion commander's stripes stepped out of the line.
His name tape said Talmadge.
He smiled.
"So you're the lab girl."
"I'm Mara."
"My father says you're a weapon." He walked a slow circle around me. "He says you can't even shake hands."
"Then you shouldn't be this close."
Somebody in the ranks laughed.
Talmadge's smile slipped.
"Show us."
"No."
"Ten bucks says she's a fake," a cadet called out. "Gloves are just for show."
"Show us," Talmadge said again, and his hand shot out.
He caught the cuff of my left glove and tore it down my arm and off my hand.
Cold air hit my bare fingers.
I flinched back, but he was already stumbling forward with the glove in his fist, and my fingertip brushed the back of his hand.
It was less than a second.
I felt it go, the way I always felt it, a small hot pull under my skin like a drain opening.
Talmadge looked down.
A grey patch spread across his knuckles, and then it turned black.
He opened his mouth to scream, and no sound came out.
The rows broke apart.
Cadets shouted and backed away from him, from me, from the black spreading up his wrist.
I stood there with my bare hand held out in front of me.
"Don't move."
A man's voice, low and furious, came from behind me.
A hand with a rough army glove shoved Talmadge's arm away from me and clamped a tourniquet around his wrist.
The man was soldier tall, with a scar through his left eyebrow, and he did not look at me once while he worked.
When the black stopped climbing, he pulled the glove from Talmadge's clenched fist and pushed it into my chest.
Then he finally looked at me.
His eyes were green and flat with rage.
"Day one," he said. "And you've already killed a hand."
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